Word: grahame
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...seems oldfashioned. He unblushingly applies the hard-sell technique to God ("I am selling," he says, "the greatest product in the world; why shouldn't it be promoted as well as soap?"). And yet such eminently low-pressure, dignity-bound clerics as the Archbishop of Canterbury have given Graham their blessing. A farewell dinner given for him in London this spring included 70 peers and peeresses, and even the austerely intellectual Manchester Guardian admitted, "He has a holy simplicity...
...Conversion. The pious parents of William Franklin Graham Jr. planted his feet firmly on the path of truth and righteousness. His farmer father once gave him a hiding in church with his broad leather belt for fidgeting during the sermon. The day beer was taken off Prohibition, Billy's father went to town and bought a case. Then, in an awesome atmosphere of ritual sacrifice, he forced Billy and one of his sisters to guzzle bottle after bottle until they were sick. "It was awful," recalls Billy. He has never touched it since...
...Mordecai Fowler Ham, a fiery-eyed, long-fingered Kentucky revivalist, began to blaze away at Charlotte from a tabernacle on the edge of town. Billy Frank Graham somehow sensed that he was a sitting duck for Mordecai Ham, and carefully stayed away. Finally, at his mother's urging, Billy went to the tabernacle with his good friend. Grady Wilson. For a week the two boys quailed under the gimlet gaze of Mordecai. who seemed to be searching out their most secret sins. Then they joined the choir so they could stand behind him, but there was no hiding place...
...Billy went on practicing -mostly exhorting the fish and alligators of a nearby swamp to leave their evil ways and be saved. He preached his first real revival at the Baptist Church of East Palatka, Fla. in June 1939. Halfway through the week-long series, word spread that Preacher Graham, nominally a Presbyterian, had never been immersed. One look at the shocked and sour faces before him and Billy was inspired to announce that he would be baptized at the revival's end along with his own new converts. No less than Si converts were baptized. Says Billy: "That...
Assist from a Gangster. Billy Graham surely showed a singleness of goal. In 1943, he toyed with the idea of joining up as a G.I., decided against it, instead volunteered for the chaplains' corps. Later he withdrew from the corps, saw no war service at all (as a minister he was draft exempt). After a year as pastor of a small basement church in Western Springs, Ill. (the active congregation more than doubled while Billy was there), he joined an organization called "Youth for Christ," founded in Chicago to combat delinquency among teenagers. As a Youth-for-Christer, Billy...